President delivers ‘executive verdict’ as Feds draft in Gitmo interrogators to handle 19 year old student held in custody

Rule number one for any serious crime scene or investigation is to gather all the evidence and all the testimonies first, before being able to establish criminal charges, let alone deliver any meaningful verdict.

In an extraordinary executive intervention, the President of the United States has weighed in on the Boston Bombing case – already delivering a guilty verdict for the Tsaranev brothers.

Executive Verdict?

Barack Obama informed the nation this weekend, “Whatever hateful agenda drove these men to such heinous acts will not, cannot, prevail. Whatever they thought they could achieve, they’ve already failed.”

The President added to this conclusion,“Why did young men who grew up and studied here as part of our communities and our country resort to such violence?”

Why is there such an incessant rush by the White House to quickly draw a line under this case? Does the President know something yet to be discovered by CSI investigators and witness interviewers in this case?

Granted, a trial in the media is almost expected these days in America, but are we being asked to give up the expectation that the business of determining guilt should be within the jurisdiction of CSI teams, police detectives and the courts – and not within the scope of any politician’s remit? Is it the President’s role to play judge in such matters?

Despite all the patriotic rhetoric, political hype and media fanfare endured over this last week, the fundamental problem with such conclusive statements by the executive branch – is that suspect Dzhokar Tsarnaev is only that – a suspect, and no actual or real forensic, or eyewitness evidence has been produced to prove that either him, or his deceased older brother were the actual bombers.
It has been confirmed that the suspect Dzhokar was not read his Miranda Rights by law enforcement. According to officials, the surviving suspect should not receive the same Constitutional rights normally offered to Americans by invoking a “public safety exception”, effectively placing him in the category of enemy combatant.

“The government has invoked the public safety exception, a designation that allows investigators to question the teen without reading him his Miranda rights and without a lawyer present, another Justice Department official, also speaking on condition of anonymity, told CNN.”

Will Dzhokar be allowed to talk?

Interestingly, we are told that 19 year old student Dzhokar may not be able talk at all, due to injuries sustained to his throat.

“The surviving suspect in the Boston Marathon bombings suffered an injury to his throat and may not be able to talk, a federal official told CNN on Saturday, possibly hindering attempts by authorities to question him about a motive in the attack.”

The health and well-being of the suspect should be of the up most importance to everyone involved. One should also note here that if this suspect is not able to tell his story in public, it would be a great loss to the American people, who might be robbed of any further evidence and insight into the actual involvement of the two Tsarnaev brother in the Boston Bombings last week.

Beyond this, if any untoward behaviour or broken procedure was done by law enforcement during the pursuit and apprehension of the two suspects, this would likely be revealed by Dzhokar’s own testimony. His inability to talk might be convenient for law enforcement, if any basic rules of engagement were broken.

PHOTO: Officials announce that Gitmo and CIA torture team on its way to handle suspect questioning.

Guantanamo interrogators assigned to suspect

If this suspect is able to talk eventually, he may have to go through a process of interrogation that is normally reserved for US detainees held at the government’s dubious offshore facility in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

ABC news conformed today that a team specialising in ‘enhanced interrogation’ are already on the way to conduct information extraction from the 19 year old student.

“Tsarnaev will be questioned by a federal team called the High Value Detainee Interrogation Group, which includes officials of the FBI, CIA, and Defense Department, an Obama administration official said.”

This development carries additional implications as to the definition of a suspect’s rights to a fair testimony and trial in the United States.

Sadly, it threatens to drag the entire torture debate back to square one again, with the obvious question rearing its old head: is any evidence or testimony gleaned through torturing a suspect even admissible in a modern court of law? The key word there being “modern”.

Rather than seize the opportunity to advance modern progress in justice and human rights – to really prove the robustness of our own justice system (yes, that one we supposedly fought and died for), the Federal jackboot, led in this instance by President Obama, has chosen to digress instead.

The big questions buzzing over Boston Bombers Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev have a single answer: It emerged in the 102 tense hours between the twin Boston Marathon bombings Monday, April 15 – which left three dead, 180 injured and a police officer killed at MIT – and Dzohkhar’s capture Friday, April 19 in Watertown.

The conclusion reached by debkafile’s counterterrorism and intelligence sources is that the brothers were double agents, hired by US and Saudi intelligence to penetrate the Wahhabi jihadist networks which, helped by Saudi financial institutions, had spread across the restive Russian Caucasian.

Instead, the two former Chechens betrayed their mission and went secretly over to the radical Islamist networks.

By this tortuous path, the brothers earned the dubious distinction of being the first terrorist operatives to import al Qaeda terror to the United States through a winding route outside the Middle East – the Caucasus.

This broad region encompasses the autonomous or semi-autonomous Muslim republics of Dagestan, Ingushetia, Kabardino-Balkaria, Chechnya, North Ossetia and Karachyevo-Cherkesiya, most of which the West has never heard of.

Moscow however keeps these republics on a tight military and intelligence leash, constantly putting down violent resistance by the Wahhabist cells, which draw support from certain Saudi sources and funds from the Riyadh government for building Wahhabist mosques and schools to disseminate the state religion of Saudi Arabia.
The Saudis feared that their convoluted involvement in the Caucasus would come embarrassingly to light when a Saudi student was questioned about his involvement in the bombng attacks while in a Boston hospital with badly burned hands.

They were concerned to enough to send Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Saudi al-Faisal to Washington Wednesday, April 17, in the middle of the Boston Marathon bombing crisis, for a private conversation with President Barack Obama and his national security adviser Tom Donilon on how to handle the Saudi angle of the bombing attack.
That day too, official Saudi domestic media launched an extraordinary three-day campaign. National and religious figures stood up and maintained that authentic Saudi Wahhabism does not espouse any form of terrorism or suicide jihadism and the national Saudi religion had nothing to do with the violence in Boston. “No matter what the nationality and religious of the perpetrators, they are terrorists and deviants who represent no one but themselves.”

Prince Saud was on a mission to clear the 30,000 Saudi students in America of suspicion of engaging in terrorism for their country or religion, a taint which still lingers twelve years after 9/11. He was concerned that exposure of the Tsarnaev brothers’ connections with Wahhabist groups in the Caucasus would revive the stigma.

The Tsarnaevs’ recruitment by US intelligence as penetration agents against terrorist networks in southern Russia explains some otherwise baffling features of the event:
1. An elite American college in Cambridge admitted younger brother Dzhokhar and granted him a $2,500 scholarship, without subjecting him to the exceptionally stiff standard conditions of admission. This may be explained by his older brother Tamerlan demanding this privilege for his kid brother in part payment for recruitment.
2. When in 2011, a “foreign government” (Russian intelligence) asked the FBI to screen Tamerlan for suspected ties to Caucasian Wahhabist cells during a period in which they had begun pledging allegiance to al Qaeda, the agency, it was officially revealed, found nothing incriminating against him and let him go after a short interview.

He was not placed under surveillance. Neither was there any attempt to hide the fact that he paid a long visit to Russia last year and on his return began promoting radical Islam on social media.
Yet even after the Boston marathon bombings, when law enforcement agencies, heavily reinforced by federal and state personnel, desperately hunted the perpetrators, Tamerlan Tsarnaev was never mentioned as a possible suspect

3. Friday, four days after the twin explosions at the marathon finishing line, the FBI released footage of Suspect No. 1 in a black hat and Suspect No. 2 in a white hat walking briskly away from the crime scene, and appealed to the public to help the authorities identify the pair.
We now know this was a charade. The authorities knew exactly who they were. Suddenly, during the police pursuit of their getaway car from the MIT campus on Friday, they were fully identified. The brother who was killed in the chase was named Tamerlan, aged 26, and the one who escaped, only to be hunted down Saturday night hiding in a boat, was 19-year old Dzhokhar.

Our intelligence sources say that we may never know more than we do today about the Boston terrorist outrage which shook America – and most strikingly, Washington – this week. We may not have the full story of when and how the Chechen brothers were recruited by US intelligence as penetration agents – any more than we have got to the bottom of tales of other American double agents who turned coat and bit their recruiters.

Here is just a short list of some of the Chechen brothers’ two-faced predecessors:

In the 1980s, an Egyptian called Ali Abdul Saoud Mohamed offered his services as a spy to the CIA residence in Cairo. He was hired, even though he was at the time the official interpreter of Ayman al-Zuwahiri, then Osama bin Laden’s senior lieutenant and currently his successor.

He accounted for this by posing as a defector. But then, he turned out to be feeding al Qaeda US military secrets. Later, he was charged with Al Qaeda’s 1998 bombings of US embassies in Nairobi and Dar es-Salaam.
On Dec. 30, 2009, the Jordanian physician Humam Khalil al-Balawi, having gained the trust of US intelligence in Afghanistan as an agent capable of penetrating al Qaeda’s top ranks, detonated a bomb at a prearranged rendezvous in Kost, killing the four top CIA agents in the country.
Then, there was the French Muslim Mohamed Merah. He was recruited by French intelligence to penetrate Islamist terror cells in at least eight countries, including the Caucasus. At the end of last year, he revealed his true spots in deadly attacks on a Jewish school in Toulouse and a group of French military commandoes.

The debate has begun over the interrogation of the captured Boston bomber Dzhokhar Tsarmayev when he is fit for questioning after surgery for two bullet wounds and loss of blood. The first was inflicted during the police chase in which his brother Tamerlan was killed.

An ordinary suspect would be read his rights (Miranda) and be permitted a lawyer. In his case, the “public safety exemption” option may be invoked, permitting him to be questioned without those rights, provided the interrogation is restricted to immediate public safety concerns. President Barack Obama is also entitled to rule him an “enemy combatant” and so refer him to a military tribunal and unrestricted grilling.

According to debkafile’s counter terror sources, four questions should top the interrogators’ agenda:

a) At what date did the Tsarnaev brothers turn coat and decide to work for Caucasian Wahhabi networks?

b) Did they round up recruits for those networks in the United States – particularly, among the Caucasian and Saudi communities?
c) What was the exact purpose of the Boston Marathon bombings and their aftermath at MIT in Watertown?
d) Are any more terrorist attacks in the works in other American cities?

As the hunt for the bombers culminated in a dramatic shoot-out, it emerged that Tamerlan Tsarnaev had been interviewed by US officials in 2011 because the Russian government was concerned over his ties to “radical Islam”.

There were fears that Tamerlan, who was killed while trying to flee police on Friday evening, was ready to travel to the Caucasus to join “underground groups”. However, the 26-year-old was released after the FBI assessed he had no connection to terrorist activity.

The disclosure came just hours after the manhunt for Tamerlan’s younger brother Dzhokhar, one of the biggest in US history, had culminated in a suburban back garden.

The 19-year-old was found cowering in a boat by a Boston resident who had wandered outside to stretch his legs and noticed a trail of blood. Police quickly surrounded the property and Dzhokhar was arrested after a gunfight in which 30 shots were fired.

The FBI was facing urgent questions last night over the extent of its knowledge of the two brothers, immigrants from the Caucuses. Their mother and father both claimed yesterday that US federal agents had kept the brothers under watch for at least three years. Zubeidat Tsarnaeva said FBI agents had told her they feared her son Tamerlan was an “extremist leader”.

The FBI confirmed yesterday it had interviewed Tamerlan in 2011, at the request of an unidentified foreign government — later reported to be Russia — over suspected ties to an extremist group.

The questioning did not produce any “derogatory” information and the matter was put “to bed,” a US law enforcement source said.

The FBI’s contact with Tamerlan was described as “a sit-down interview where they asked him questions about contacts and surroundings”.

They are also likely to have conducted a standard background check on him, running his name through databases, checking on his communications and any overseas travel.

The FBI said in a statement: “The request stated that it was based on information that he was a follower of radical Islam and a strong believer, and that he had changed drastically since 2010 as he prepared to leave the United States for travel to the country’s region to join unspecified underground groups.”

The matter was not pursued further, however, because interviews with Tamerlan and family members “did not find any terrorism activity, domestic or foreign”.

Michael McCaul, the Republican chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, said: “It’s new information to me and it’s very disturbing that he’s on the FBI radar screen.”

Zubeidat Tsarnaeva said: “They [the FBI] used to come [to our] home, they used to talk to me. They were telling me that he [Tamerlan] was really an extremist leader and that they were afraid of him. They told me whatever information he is getting, he gets from these extremist sites.

“They were controlling him, they were controlling his every step and now they say that this is a terrorist act. Never, ever is this true, my sons are innocent.” She added: “I am 100 per cent sure that this is a set-up. It’s impossible for both of them to do those things. If there was anyone who would know, it would be me.”

Dzhokhar’s capture triggered jubilant scenes across Boston and brought to an end a five-day drama in which police imposed an unprecedented lockdown across the city.

It also emerged on Saturday that Tamerlan’s wife was a Muslim convert from a middle-class Boston family.

Katherine Russell, 24, converted to Islam three years ago, after meeting Tamerlan and giving birth to their daughter Zahara. She was described by neighbours as an “all-American girl”. Dzhokhar, 19, was on Saturday night being treated for “serious but not life-threatening” injuries at a hospital in Boston. He suffered a severe loss of blood and was said to be too ill to talk to police about the motive for the attack.

The US Justice Department said on Saturday that Dzhokhar would not initially be read his rights, under a rare public safety exemption that allows officials to interrogate him and submit his statement in court without prior legal warning. An official said Dzhokhar could face a range of charges, including the use of weapons of mass destruction for his part in the detonation of a bomb. That charge carries a maximum penalty of death.

While Massachusetts has outlawed the death penalty, federal law allows it.

The brothers, ethnic Chechens who were apparently well integrated into US society, are suspected of having set off two bombs in pressure cookers packed with ball bearings and nails at the finish line of the Boston Marathon, killing three people and injuring nearly 180 more.

Among those who died was eight-year-old Martin Richard, whose family welcomed Dzhokhar’s capture. In a statement they said: “Tonight, our community is once again safe from these two men.”

However, further questions were raised when it was reported that Tamerlan left the US in January 2012 to travel to Russia, returning in mid-July.

An official at the Department of Homeland Security said he was on the “radar screen” of agents in Boston from when he returned to the US to the end of autumn.

The suspects’ father, Anzor Tsarnaev, who lives in the Russian republic of Dagestan, also said the FBI had been watching his family and visited the brothers’ home in Cambridge, Massachusetts, five times, most recently 18 months ago, looking for Tamerlan. “They said there were doing preventive work. They were afraid there might be some explosions on the streets of Boston,” he said.

Tamerlan was allegedly one of a number of young Muslim men who were feared to have become radicalised at one of the city’s mosques.

National security and law enforcement authorities had said earlier that they had not turned up any evidence that the Tsarnaev brothers had contacts with al-Qaeda or other militants overseas.

On Saturday night, FBI agents led a woman wearing a hijab away from the apartment where the brothers had lived in Boston. One television channel said the woman was Tamerlan’s wife, although a neighbour said it was another relation.

Speaking after Dzhokhar’s capture, President Obama said there were still many unanswered questions. “Among them, why did young men who grew up and studied here as part of our communities and our country resort to such violence?” He said the families of those killed deserve answers.

According to the Boston Globe, Dzhokhar attended a soccer party on Wednesday at the University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth, where other guests described him as looking relaxed.

While Tamerlan had a Green Card but was not a US citizen, Dzhokhar became a naturalised citizen during a ceremony on Sept 11 last year.

In announcing his arrest, Boston police posted a notice on Twitter at 1.30am GMT on Friday, stating: “Captured!!! The hunt is over.”

Did younger bomber KILL his own brother by running him over? Police chief’s dramatic account of firefight reveals suspect was still alive when he was hit by sibling’s car

‘He all of a sudden comes out from under cover and just starts walking down the street, shooting at our police officers, trying to get closer,’ Deveau said

Suspect eventually ran out of ammunition and was tackled to the ground

His brother jumped behind the wheel of carjacked SUV and ran Tamerlan over, dragging his body a short distance

Over 200 rounds were fired in the span of 5-10 minutes

Police say suspects lobbed five crude bombs at them, at least one of them a pressure cooker explosive

The older of the two Chechen brothers suspected of bombing the Boston Marathon was wounded but alive following a police gun battle when his younger brother ran him over with a car, possibly causing his death.

Offering the first detailed account of the firefight, Police Chief Edward Deveau, of Watertown, Massachusetts, where the drama had unfolded early Friday morning, has revealed that 26-year-old Tamerlan Tsarnaev walked towards officers firing a gun before he ran out of ammunition and was tackled to the ground.

‘He all of a sudden comes out from under cover and just starts walking down the street, shooting at our police officers, trying to get closer,’ Deveau said.

Suspects: Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26, left, was reportedly run over by his accomplice and younger brother Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, 19

Gun battle: The drama unfolded after the suspects allegedly gunned down a police officer for MIT at the school’s Cambridge campus

‘Now, my closest officer is five to 10 feet away, and they’re exchanging gunfire between them. And he runs out of ammunition — the bad guy — and so one of my police officers comes off the side and tackles him in the street.’

He was in the process of being handcuffed by two or three officers when his younger brother, 19-year-old Dzhokhar, jumped behind the wheel of a black SUV the two hand allegedly carjacked earlier and barreled toward the group.

Officers who were restraining Tamerlan Tsarnaev got out of the way of the speeding vehicle, which ended up driving over the wounded suspect, the police chief told CNN.

According to Deveau, the 19-year-old suspect dragged his sibling’s body a short distance down the street and drove off. He later ditched the SUV and escaped on foot.